by Joe Klein
They worked all day, snacking on protein bars, losing track of time and place, losing themselves in the effort to heal the gracious, grateful Haitians. One of their patients had a broken back and was partially paralyzed. He could move his arms, but his legs were crushed. He needed to get to a hospital. They flagged down a Haitian driving a hatchback who agreed to take their patient. He was littered on a door, which was longer than the hatch bed—the patient’s lower legs were sticking out the back. They paid the driver to go to the hospital. There was no guarantee that he’d do it, but after a day of work at Manresa, their default position was that most Haitians were not only benign but also intent on helping out.
The taxis that had brought them to Manresa had promised to return at four p.m., but they didn’t. As evening fell, François managed to hail a couple of tap-taps to take them back to the Jesuit novitiate. “We’ve got to solve the transport situation,” McNulty said to Jake.
“What do you propose?”
“We can’t wait for ambulances or relief crews. Let’s charter two tap-taps and overpay, to guarantee they’ll be there for us.”
He asked François to hire two tap-taps for $100 per day, plus $10 for every emergency run—which was ridiculously generous in Port-au-Prince, where the going rate for rides was loose change. By the end of the week, they had five dedicated tap-taps, as more teams of doctors and nurses arrived via the Jesuits back in Chicago.
Brother Jim Boynton had been a Jesuit for twenty-six years, most of them spent teaching in Detroit. A year earlier, his superiors had asked if he’d be interested in an international assignment. “Absolutely,” he’d said. He asked for someplace in South America, where he could use his Spanish. They sent him to Haiti, which was close, but not Spanish-speaking; he would have to learn Creole. He was sent to Ouanaminthe, a lush, tropical town near the Haitian-Dominican border, where he became the principal of the local school.
On the afternoon of the earthquake, he was in Ouanaminthe, playing Irish jigs on his fiddle for some of the students in the street outside the Jesuit residence. The kids were dancing as the ground began to shake and tumble. And it was magical: the kids continued to dance as the ground heaved, as if they were playing on one of those inflated plastic bounce-house contraptions. When the temblors stopped, he surveyed the rest of the village, mostly reed and mud huts, and found everything was pretty much okay. But he soon began receiving emails about the disaster in Port-au-Prince. His Jesuit superiors asked him to go to Santo Domingo, organize a medical team, and head back to the novitiate in Haiti’s capital city. He had experience with disaster relief, and he knew that these operations could take months to get organized. He didn’t know where to start . . . and then, at that very moment—a sure sign of Divine Providence—the email from William McNulty popped into his mailbox.
Brother Jim’s only previous experience with the military was to protest at the gates of Fort Benning against the School of the Americas, a training facility for Latin American military personnel, including those who had committed massacres against Roman Catholic priests and nuns in El Salvador. But he found himself immediately at ease when he met Wood and McNulty. “You’re Jesuit-educated?” he asked Will, although he already knew the answer to that question.
“Yep,” McNulty replied. “I’m a ‘man for others,’ ” he said, citing the Jesuit motto.
Jake looked Brother Jim in the eye, from his great height. “So you’re a monk?” he asked with a laugh. Brother Jim was wearing his usual—T-shirt, shorts, and a crucifix. “I’m glad you’re here,” Jake continued. “We probably couldn’t have figured this out without you.”
Boynton had been up all the previous night, securing the medical supplies and arranging logistics, and now Jake said, “You look like you could use some shut-eye. We’ve got a big day tomorrow,” and just like that, Jim was following Jake’s orders. That seemed strange: he was forty-two; Jake was twenty-seven. Over the next few days, Brother Jim would watch how Jake led—treating everyone with respect, reading situations accurately and decisively, leavening a moment with a wisecrack—and he realized that this was the first young person whose judgment he trusted more than his own.
On the road to Port-au-Prince, Mark Hayward had briefed Boynton about what to do if he got shot and how to deal with severed arteries—basic military first aid stuff and entirely terrifying—Brother Jim blanched, and Jake read that, too: “Don’t worry, Jim,” he said. “It’s gonna be all right.”
“Please God, don’t let me get shot,” Brother Jim prayed. But also, “Thank you, Lord, for sending me these guys.” When they loaded the two pickup trucks for the trip from the border to Port-au-Prince, Boynton made sure to get into the one with Jake and William.
Brother Jim was shocked by the casualties, the number and severity of the wounds at Manresa on their first day of work. Jake and Will had told him they were shocked, too, but they didn’t show it. He was amazed by how calm and well organized they were. That night, they gathered outdoors around a fire near a massive banyan tree at the novitiate for dinner and a debrief. The chow was beans and rice, comfort food, perfectly satisfying. There was beer. The debrief would become a nightly routine, as would the beer.
Jake started the proceedings, reviewing the day’s deployment and explaining the next day’s assignment. The Jesuits wanted them to go to an AIDS clinic run by Mother Teresa’s nuns. Jake split the group into two teams and announced the new tap-tap transport arrangement. They had used up all their medicine the first day and were hoping that there would be some at the AIDS clinic. In the afternoon, McNulty would go to the airport, where two and a half tons of medical supplies and a team of doctors and nurses were supposed to be coming in on a United charter flight from Chicago, courtesy of the Jesuits. Getting the supplies to the novitiate was going to be a real headache. Every day, thousands of tons were landing at the airport, which was being run by American troops, but they were not getting out.
After going through the logistics, there was a stress debrief, which also became a nightly feature. Brother Jim led this part. The team members were encouraged to talk about the emotional impact of the things they’d seen and done, but they also talked about the strange exhilaration of being part of a military-style mission again. It was a total euphoric relief, Jake thought, being part of a Band of Brothers but not having to kill anyone.
One day during Jake’s second combat deployment, as part of a scout-sniper unit in Afghanistan, his team had spotted a high-value target, surrounded by children, two hundred yards away. Jake had been the spotter; his friend and superior, Shawn Beidler, had been the shooter. The target’s heart seemed to explode in a gusher of blood against a mud wall; Jake watched the children through his scope, their faces frozen in horror, then the screaming and running. He couldn’t stop thinking about those kids after he came home. But he had been surrounded by children all day at Manresa, some of them being treated for their wounds, others asking if they could help out, others just hanging around, amazed by the presence of these giant Americans who were working nonstop to set bones and clean wounds. And Jake realized, in that moment, he was feeling healthier, too. Except for his foot, which was killing him; he was wearing combat boots again, and they truly sucked.
Brother Jim had experienced spiritual bonding before; he was, after all, part of a brotherhood. But this was different, far more intense—the spiritual unity on the team was immediate, augmented by the physical work and the potential danger. He wondered: Was this brotherhood the real attraction of the military? He had never really thought about it before. “I have not been the greatest supporter of our soldiers,” he admitted that night during the stress debrief. “In fact, I protested against our military at Fort Benning. But you’re a product of that military, and I have to say that while I’m not ashamed of protesting in the past, I can also say with a great deal of certainty that, after today, I’ll never do it again. You are who you are because of your military training. You are more prepared to serve humanity—to be ‘a man for ot
hers’—than if you’d been in a monastery reading Thomistic philosophy for the past ten years. And, quite frankly, I’m glad you haven’t been.”
Brother Jim then led them in St. Ignatius of Loyola’s daily prayer:
Lord, teach me to be generous.
Teach me to serve you as you deserve;
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to ask for reward,
save that of knowing that I do your will.
That became part of the daily ritual as well.
Jake, McNulty, and Brother Jim shared a three-man tent, and Will was the last to sleep each night. He was in charge of the blogging, which he would tap out on his BlackBerry and send to Jake’s sister in Bettendorf, Iowa, who would post it. Phone calls were hard; text was easier—and, though they didn’t know it, Team Rubicon’s exploits were beginning to be noticed on Jesuit blogs and in local newspapers. Contributions were coming in, and Jake’s father, Jeff Wood, was organizing transport for more medical supplies and volunteers. As the days passed, Jeff realized that he would have to take off time from his day job as the vice president of a factory in Bettendorf to coordinate Team Rubicon’s stateside logistics.
The days were warm, but the nights were chilly in January. Will would slip into the tent and sleep between Jake and Brother Jim. Somehow, each morning he’d wind up with all the blankets—it was very weird—and Jake would be shivering, with none of them. Jake joked about it but never got angry.
The caseload at Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity AIDS clinic was small compared to Manresa—only a few dozen—but nine had serious problems that required higher echelon treatment. And there was no medicine. Brother Jim offered to take several of the more seriously wounded to University—the city’s main hospital—in one of the tap-taps and see if he could find some drugs, splints, and bandages.
The hospital was a white stucco building with green trim, guarded by American troops from the 82nd Airborne. Somehow it hadn’t been damaged in the quake. But there was chaos inside. There were a handful of nurses and civilian volunteers trying to take care of hundreds of suffering patients. Brother Jim asked one of the nurses, “Do you have medicine that I can take to my doctors?”
“You have doctors?” the nurse replied. “Get them down here immediately. We have no doctors.”
Brother Jim raced back to the Mother Teresa clinic. When Jake heard the news, he was boggled—the largest emergency room in town had no doctors?—and decisive: “We’re going to the hospital.”
Within an hour, Dr. Dave Griswell was running the emergency room at University with the rest of Team Rubicon helping out, working as they had at Manresa the day before.
That afternoon, Jake saw a middle-aged woman brought in with lesions and open sores all over her body, her legs mangled. She was barely coherent. “Be careful,” Dr. Griswell said. “I think we have an advanced-stage AIDS patient here.”
Jake grimaced. “Oh, God,” he said. He hadn’t dealt with any advanced-stage AIDS patients, and he struggled to overcome his revulsion. But he had no real choice: he was there to help. He put on an extra layer of surgical gloves.
“We’ve got to start taking off her clothes,” said Mark Hayward—now known as “Doc Army”—and Jake pulled out his combat knife, the first time he’d used it since Afghanistan, and began slicing away her clothes from the shoulders down. Hayward worked from the bottom up, raising her skirt, and what they saw was impossible. Her pubic area, her legs and thighs and stomach were covered with purple blotches and open sores. Her entire pelvic bone was protruding through the skin on one side; the other side was crushed. Jake stopped, gasped, looked at Doc Army.
“She’s expectant,” Hayward said. Jake knew the term—it was Army-speak for near death, nothing more they could do.
“Okay,” he said now, and moved away, thinking: Okay, let’s cover her up, let her die with dignity, and go on to the next case.
About ten minutes later, Jake passed by her bed and was amazed to see Dr. Gris lying on the gurney, trying to insert a catheter to enable her to urinate. Jake stopped and watched.
Doc Army had stopped, too, and was watching Griswell reverently. “You know, Jake,” he said, “here’s a weird one: if it weren’t for this disaster, she’d die in the streets, alone, cold, and in pain. It took a goddamn earthquake to bring someone to this country who cares enough about her comfort to do this.”
Griswell worked on her for what seemed an eternity—it was probably only ten minutes—before he conceded defeat. Her canal had withered and stiffened too much to accept the catheter, and Doc knew that his continued probing was opening lesions and causing her more pain. “I’m sorry, I can’t do it,” he said to her and backed away, frustrated by his failure.
She seemed to understand. She smiled weakly and nodded at him.
Jake lost it then. He rushed outside to an alley and began to weep. He was horrified by the poor woman’s suffering, but he was also blown away by Dr. Gris and the dedication of the team. He didn’t have much time for self-indulgence; there were other people who needed help. It was a decorous weep, brief and quiet.
McNulty also had been overwhelmed by the sight of Dr. Gris trying to care for the woman, and he took his tears to a separate alley. His cry had been explosive, the sobs erupting from a place he’d never been before. He kept his tears a secret, as Jake did—it would be years before they figured out that they’d lost it at the same moment, for precisely the same reasons.
Meanwhile, Dr. Dolhun, the obstetrician from San Francisco, was delivering babies and doing amputations. Each new baby seemed a particular triumph to McNulty, amid all the death and truncation. There were still no drugs. Amputee patients were given Motrin for their pain; they were given socks to bite on as Dr. Dolhun picked up the saw. There was terrible screaming, lacerating eardrums. Warm January breezes blew through the jalousie windows—the sort of breezes William had always associated with spring break, but now they were a blessing, a balm amid the suffering.
Brother Jim was working on a boy who had come in with his father. The boy had dirty bandages on his head, legs, and feet. Dr. Gris told Boynton to remove the bandages. One of the Milwaukee firefighters helped him . . . and the boy’s skin came off with the bandage, and the cheesy smell—gangrene—almost knocked Jim down. He’d later write on Jake’s blog, “As I lifted the leg for the fireman to remove more bandage, my fingers went into the flesh like I was holding canned tuna fish.” The leg would have to be amputated, but the boy would survive.
That afternoon, McNulty went to the airport to gather the advance guard of what he and Jake were calling Bravo Element, the medical reinforcements sent by the Chicago Jesuits. Four male nurses from Masonic Hospital in Chicago had arrived; another flight was coming the next day with the rest of the team and the medical supplies. Inside the airport, the U.S. military was running an orderly operation; outside, there was mayhem. Crowds—thousands of Haitians—banged on the gates, hoping to get at the tons of food and water sitting inside.
And now, for the first time, there was violence. McNulty loaded the nurses into a tap-tap and was beginning to brief them when a crowd attacked the supply truck in front of them with rocks. Apparently, the Haitians were convinced that there was food or water in the truck. Some of the rocks pelted Team Rubicon’s tap-tap, which stopped. That was part of the drill, William had learned: it was called a tap-tap because you got it to stop by tapping loudly on the side panel. McNulty jumped out and yelled at the driver to keep going, then splayed himself on the hood until they’d gotten clear of the crowd. It was the only violent incident of their deployment in Haiti.
A strong aftershock—6.1 on the Richter scale—woke them the next morning. It was Will’s first earthquake, a discombobulating craziness. When they got back to University Hospital, the 82nd Airborne had moved all the patients from the emergency room, rolling their chipped enamel beds and pushin
g their green canvas gurneys into the courtyard. The patients were still outside, wailing and stinking, their numbers growing constantly.
Team Rubicon’s firefighters did a structural check of the hospital and decided it was habitable, and the patients were brought back inside. It was now a week after the earthquake. This was TR’s third full day of work. The first two had been difficult and tiring, but thrilling, too. Now they were bone-weary, and they were frustrated. Where the hell was everyone? Anderson Cooper from CNN was there in the emergency room, reporting on the desperate situation, there were doctors now in the operating room—but still no military doctors or medical supplies in the emergency room. The 82nd Airborne was there, but why hadn’t the U.S. military sent out more medical teams—the best combat surgeons in the world? And what about the Red Cross? Jake was particularly pissed about that.
McNulty went back to the airport and was thrilled to find that the rest of the medical team included twelve doctors and nurses—and a cook. (The cook would be re-tasked as a pharmacist.) They had the troops for a real operation now. The Jesuits had also sent 150 cartons of medical supplies, arranged on pallets. McNulty went to the Command Operations Center at the airport to see if he could get the military to help transport the supplies back to the novitiate. He met with a female Major, who was in charge of coordinating the nongovernmental organizations’ efforts. “How the hell did you get medical supplies?” she snapped.